Finity's End - a Union-Alliance Novel (17 page)

Morning mess hall was another collection of cousins, mostly seniors. Fifty people ate at a set time, on schedule—be hungry or skip it entirely, unless you had an excuse or a favor-point with the cook, so Jeremy said.

Fletcher ate at the same table with Jeremy and two other only moderately pubescent juniors, Vincent and Linda, both doubtless older in station years than they seemed, but mentally like the age they looked, they mostly jabbered about games or what they'd done on Pell docks, their speech larded with
wild, decadent
, and
fancy
, juvvie-buzz that seemed current among their small set. Mostly they ignored him, beyond the first exchange of names, turned shoulders to him without seeming to notice it in the heat of their conversational passion, and Jeremy's eyes lit with the game-jabber, too.

Being ignored didn't matter to Fletcher. He'd lain awake and tossed and turned in his bunk. Jeremy had lent him music tapes and those had gotten him through the dark hours.

But today he had to work with these kids who admittedly knew everything he didn't; and he went with them when they'd had their breakfast—a decent breakfast, if he'd had the appetite, which he didn't.

They all went, still jabbering about dinosaurs and hell levels, down to A14, and in the next few hours he learned all about laundry, how to sort, fold, stack, and keep a cheerful face right along with the two other juniors in the mess pool with him and Jeremy.

They'd drawn Laundry as their work for this five-day stint… but not
every
day. You didn't get stuck on one kind of job as a junior. That was a relief to learn.

The junior-juniors, the ship's youngest, the seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds among whom he was unwillingly rated, drew such jobs relatively often. But so did the mid-level techs, from time to time. Juniors, so Jeremy said, rotated through Laundry to Minor Maintenance, to Scrub, to Galley, but there were jobs all over the ship that were rotating jobs, or part-time jobs, or jobs people did only on call.

Junior-juniors inevitably got the worst assignments, Fletcher keenly suspected. Laundry was
everybody's
laundry; laundry for several hundred people who'd been out on liberty for two weeks was a
lot
of laundry, sonic and chemical cleaning for some tissue-fabrics, water-cleaning for the rough stuff, dry, fold, sort, and stack by rank.

It filled the time that otherwise would have required too much thinking, and it was a job where you did meet just about everybody, as people came to the counter for pickup of what they'd sent in at undock and to pick up small store items like soap refills for their showers, and sewing kits, and other odd notions.

Fletcher didn't remember all the names by half—except Parton, who was blind, and who had one mechanical eye for ordinary things, Jeremy said, and the other one was a computer screen for cargo data or anything else Parton elected to receive. He didn't think he'd forget Parton, who asked him to stand still a moment until his mechanical vision had registered a template of his face. He'd never met a blind person. But Jeremy said Parton's left eye was sharp all the way into situations where the rest of them couldn't see, and Parton didn't always know whether there was light or not. His mechanical eye could spot you just the same.

Laundry pickup was a place to hear gossip—all the gossip in the ship, he supposed, if you kept your ears open. He picked up a certain amount of information on certain individuals even with no idea who he was hearing about, and he heard how various establishments on Pell didn't meet the approval of the senior captain.

Vincent and Linda talked about various places you'd go
in civvies
, and restaurants you'd
wear a patch to
, meaning the ship's patch, he guessed. Someone dropped by the counter and gave him his own, ten black circular ship's patches, and small patches that said
Finity's End
and
Fletcher Neihart
. It was, he supposed,
belonging
. He wasn't sure how he felt about them.

Jeremy handed him a sewing kit from off the shelf of supplies. "You stitch 'em on," Jeremy said. "The shiny-thread ones are for dress outfits, the plain-thread are for work gear. If they start looking tatty you get new ones or the watch officer has a fit. I'll show you how, next watch."

Labels got your laundry back to you, that was one use of them he saw. You also had a serial number. He was F48, right next to his name. He saw that in a roll of tags that was also in the packet the man had given him. Those were just for the laundry. It was a lot of sewing on tags.

Even in the underwear and the socks.

Labeled. Everything. Head to toe.

He didn't say anything. He didn't like it. On Base he'd had to do his own laundry. Everybody did. You got your clothes back because you sensibly never dumped them in bins with everybody else's. He'd never learned to sew anything in his life, but he figured he'd learn if he wanted his socks and underwear back.

Labeling right down to his socks as
Finity
crew, though, he'd have skipped that if he could. But counting they'd lose your underwear if you didn't, it seemed a futile point on which to carry on a campaign of independence, or make what was a tolerable situation today harder than it was. Nobody had done anything unpleasant—or been too intrusively glad to see him. Vincent tried to engage him about where he'd been, holding up the ship and making them late on their schedule, but Jeremy told Vince to stop and let him alone and Vince, who came only up to mid-chest on him, took stock of him in a long look and shut up about it.

Jeremy wanted to talk about Downbelow when they got back to quarters after mess, and that was harder. They sat there stitching his labels into his socks, and Jeremy wanted to know what Downbelow looked like.

"Real pretty," he said.

"There's trees on Pell," Jeremy said

"Yeah. The garden. The ones on Downbelow are prettier." He jabbed his finger with the needle, painfully so. Sucked on it. He and Jeremy sat on their respective bunks, with a stack of his entire new wardrobe and all the clothes he'd brought with him plus a pile of the clothes he'd gotten dirty so far, and he wasn't sorry to have the help doing it.

He daydreamed for an instant about puffer-ball gold and pollen skeining down
Old
River
, beneath branches heavy with spring leaves. Rain on the water.

Jeremy chattered about what he'd seen in Pell's garden. And segued nonstop to what he wanted to do after they got the patches stitched on. Jeremy wanted him to go to rec with him tonight: there was a rec hall, with games and a canteen, Jeremy said.

"I don't want to."

"Oh, come on. What are you going to do, else?"

It was a point. He'd be alone in this closet of a room. He was tired, but he'd get to thinking about things he didn't want to think about.

He went. It was the same huge compartment they'd all been in during undock, only now there were no railings. There were game machines. A vid area. Tables and chairs, senior as well as junior crew playing cards, playing games, watching vids. He suffered a moment of dislocation, and almost balked at the transformation alone.

But the entertainments offered were very much like at the Base. Familiar situation. You mixed with senior staff and techs and all. They just generally didn't talk with junior staff.

"What do you play?" Jeremy asked him.

Dangerous question. He'd already lost ten hours to Jeremy at cards; but when he glumly decided on vids, and looked through the available cards in the bin to the side of the machines, he found an Attack game he hadn't seen since he was a small kid. The card itself when he pulled it out was old, showing a lot of use; but he remembered that game with real pleasure, and recalled he'd been pretty good at it—for a seven-year-old. He might have a chance at this one.

He appropriated a machine. Meanwhile Vince and Linda had shown up, and thought they'd join him and Jeremy.

He wasn't delighted, but he kept the expression off his face; he linked up with the three of them, a little suspecting ambush. He
didn't
play vids, not for the last four years, being short of opportunity and short of time, and he dropped into the semi-world of state-of-the-art interactives with a little caution.

Blown. Blown in two seconds. He made four tries, but he couldn't come
out
of the drop into the game fast enough with these kids to avoid getting blasted.

"This is enough," he said. But Jeremy jollied him out of quitting, said they'd play partners, and after that he lived for maybe the equivalent of a station hall block before he blew up.

He just wasn't very good at it. Or the point was, they were
very, very
good and their reflexes were astonishingly fast. When he exited the game and took the visor off he was a little disoriented from the intensity of the play they'd forced him to.
They
were different when they took theirs off, hyped, nervous, so much so that when they went for soft drinks at the bar he didn't know the Jeremy he was dealing with. Jeremy's fingers twitched, his small body was like a wound spring, and he sat and sipped a soft drink with Vince, who was a little saner, while Jeremy and Linda went back into the game and had it out. A long game. You could elect to watch the game on the screen where they were sitting; and Vince, who said he was tired, did… while Jeremy and Linda were nearby, two people just sitting at a table opposite each other, twitching occasionally, fingers moving on the pads. But on the screen two fighters were stalking each other.

"They're good," he said to Vince, aware first of a twelve-, thirteen-year-old boy's face, and second that Vince was, chronologically speaking, a year older than he was.

And third that Vince was himself too hyped for rational conversation, arms and shoulders twitching to the moves on the screen, jabbering strategy at Linda, who was, he'd found out, Vince's fairly close cousin and year-mate.

He didn't react the way these twelve- and thirteen-year-olds did—but he'd never seen any kid react the way these kids did, not the most dedicated gameheads who'd haunted the vid parlors on Pell. Something in him said
dangerous
, and something said
alien
. Something in his gut said he was going to be outmatched at anything but cards with these kids, and that there was something direly skewed about these seventeen- and eighteen-year-old twelve-year-olds.

Baby faces. Tiny bodies. High, pre-change voices. He could pick any of the three of these kids up in one hand; but their reactions in games were tigerish. He'd heard the word, and knew the association.
Tigerish
. Predatory, low brain function, and fast.

Vince and he watched and drank soft drinks and ate chips as Jeremy and Linda kept it up for another hour and a half before watch-end mandated their return to quarters—a return which, like a lot of other odd things, said to him that these weren't ordinary twelve-year-olds, who voluntarily delayed a game to sew patches on clothes, who made their beds without a wrinkle, who didn't duck out on rules—and kept a single Attack game going an hour and a half because nobody could score.

He walked the steeply curving ring beside Jeremy, who still couldn't walk like a normal human being, who was still electric and jumping with an energy he hadn't discharged. And when they got into quarters Jeremy wasn't relaxed until he'd spent a long time in the shower.

"You all right?" he asked Jeremy when the kid came out, stark naked, to dress for bed.

"Yeah." Jeremy gave a little laugh and pulled on a tee and briefs to sleep in. But there was something still a little breathless, a little strange about him.

Fletcher took his own shower and scrubbed as if he could scrub out the sight he'd just seen, and asking himself how he felt about room-sharing with a hype-head.
That
was what it reminded him of. He
had
seen people react that way. On drugs.

He didn't remember his mother playing kid games with him. He remembered his mother drugged out, but languid, most of the time, Remembered her more than once sitting at the table in the apartment and staring into space
she
didn't need a visor to see. But her arms would be hard like that, as if she were waiting for something, and her face would be—

He couldn't remember her face anymore. Not clearly. He came closest he'd come in years to remembering it with the women, senior crew, who came and went around him today. They looked
like
her. All the people on this ship looked
like
her in some subtle way, until those recent faces washed over what his mother had looked like to him.

And he remembered the times, the scariest times, when she'd been as scarily hyped as Jeremy had been in the game. How, at the last, she'd prowl the apartment and bump into walls that weren't there for her. She'd held him in her arms, the only times he could remember her holding him, and she'd say she saw the stars, she saw all the colors of space, and she'd ask him if he could see them, too.

He couldn't. Aged five, he'd thought there was something wrong with him, and that he was stupid, because he hadn't been able to see the stars the way she could. Thank God she hadn't given him any of what she was taking. She'd never gone that far down.

He let the shower fans dry his skin and his hair. He came out of the bath, abandoning the Base-induced modesty that had had him, on prior days, dressing in the cramped bath space. Jeremy didn't give him more than a glance, so he guessed it was nothing new in the intimacy of a crowded ship. Jeremy sat on his bunk letting the cards cascade between his hands, cards flying between his fingers and piling up again, sheer nervous energy.